Posts Tagged ‘railroads’

HS2: UK’s £100 Billion Rail To Nowhere

Thursday, October 26th, 2023

I’ve long documented the failures of California’s still unbuilt high speed rail, and now a video from Simon Whistler (yeah, him) covers a similar doomed British high speed rail project:

  • “Even in a country used to paying absurd prices for everything from houses to a pint of beer, it was still a pretty eye-watering figure. After initially being projected to cost under £40 billion in 2012, Britain’s second high-speed rail project, HS2, was recently calculated to be facing a price tag closer to £100 billion.”
  • “Just the first phase alone the 34 miles connecting London and Birmingham is in danger of becoming one of the most expensive railways ever built.”
  • It was originally supposed to pay for itself by offering high speed connections between London and three English industrial cities in the north: Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield. But ballooning costs forced the cancellation of those two line extensions.
  • “All rationale for HS2 vanished, leaving the UK with a multi-billion pound bill just to slightly reduce travel time between London and Birmingham.”
  • HS1 was the 62 mile high speed rail line from London to the channel tunnel. It only cost three times the estimated price.
  • One reason it was considered a success: “It had added significant extra capacity to commuter lines running into London from Kent, as much as 40% extra in peak times.”
  • In the dying days Gordon Brown’s Labor government in 2010, Transport Secretary and rail freak Lord Adonis published a white paper outlining his Utopian high speed rail vision for Britain. Unfortunately, incoming conservative George Osborne had a soft spot for flashy infrastructure projects.
  • “Neither Adonis nor Osborne nor anybody else could have envisaged a budget that would soon balloon wildly out of control.” Actually, I suspect anyone familiar with the many failures of high speed rail projects in the U.S. could indeed have envisaged it.
  • By 2015 it was up to £55 billion.
  • By 2019 it was £71 billion, or over £22,000 for every UK household.
  • After 2020 and Flu Manchu, it was over £100 billion, and PM Rishi Sunak pulled the plug on everything but the London to Birmingham stretch, which was still going to cost £53 billion, or £396 million per mile.
  • “The fast train from Euston Station to Birmingham New Street takes around 1 hour and 40 minutes. All H2 will do will shave 25 to 35 minutes off that.”
  • All infrastructure projects in the UK cost more than their equivalents in continental Europe. “The insane costs associated with planning applications in the UK, something that you could see in the proposed London Themes Crossing, which recently spent £267 million just on planning paperwork.”
  • There’s a ton of NIMBYism along the route, forcing them to spend billions building rail tunnels despite it being perfectly feasible to build it overland.

    Between London and Birmingham lies the sort of gentile English landscape that people who’ve never visited the UK believe the whole country looks like, a green swath of rolling hills, country lanes and posh blokes wearing tweed. Unfortunately, it turns out that the sort of people who live in this landscape hate the idea of London politicians plonking a fancy new train line right in the middle of it.

  • “Some countries like Japan can do tunneling at a reasonable cost. The UK is not among that group.”
  • Then there’s the well-paid army of white collar consultants, which will be familiar to any observer of California’s high speed rail project. “Among them were 40 employees paid more than £150,000 a year, and chief executives with higher salaries than any other public official in Britain.” Nice work if you can get it.
  • “In July of 20123 the government’s own infrastructure watchdog branded HS2 as unachievable saying it could not be delivered in its current form.”
  • The kicker: HS2 may never make it to central London, as building there is too expensive. “Rather than terminating at Euston Station in central London, HS2 would now end at Old Oak Common,” a suburban station, where they’re expected to catch local connections. “The new line will cost of tens of billions get you from Birmingham to central London less quickly than you can do it at the moment.”
  • But they’ve already spent £40 million for two top-of-the-line boring machines from Germany to dig the Old Oak Common to Euston segment. Current plans are to bury them in hope they might be used later.
  • “Hearing about stuff like this, it is tempting to wonder if, just maybe, the UK shouldn’t have listened to the results of the 2006 independent review into high speed rail written by Rod Edington before HS1 was even finished it concluded that highspeed rail simply isn’t worth it in Britain.”
  • “The money would be better spent on less sexy improvements, like line electrification and improving local bus services.”

    • And we all know why they’d never go that route: There simply aren’t enough opportunities for bureaucratic empire building and graft…

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    Posted in Military, Regulation, Uncategorized, unions, video, Waste and Fraud | 20 Comments »

    MiniLinkSwarm for March 25, 2022

    Saturday, March 25th, 2023

    For several weeks, I’ve been running out of time to post every link I’ve gathered, so I’ve been bumping some links (generally ones that seemed less time-sensitive or required more commentary than others) to the next week’s LinkSwarm, whereupon I may use one or two, but otherwise the process repeats.

    Well, I’m just going to post all those today to clear the decks.

  • California’s leftwing Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom is using his position as governor subsidize his wife’s own leftwing business empire.

    In the summer of 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom convinced the state legislature to provide $4.7 billion for K-12 mental health services, which, among other things, funded 10,000 new school counselors.

    Gavin Newsom convinced the legislature because Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of the governor, convinced him. The biggest advocate for mental health funding within the K-12 California public schools in the Newsom administration was Mrs. Newsom, according to published accounts.

    In fact, Gavin Newsom created The Office of First Partner so his wife could promote her policy agenda using taxpayer money. Since 2019, Siebel Newsom’s been armed with nearly $5 million and nine staffers within her subdivision of the governor’s office.

    Snip.

    Siebel Newsom spent years laying the ideological groundwork and political infrastructure to support her policy ambitions.

    In 2012, Siebel Newsom founded a nonprofit, The Representation Project, that licenses “gender justice” films and curricula to 5,000 schools in all 50 states. The year Gavin Newsom became governor, the California Board of Education adopted guidance that recommended her films and curriculum be licensed and used in classrooms.

    Policy making in California isn’t magic. Turns out, it’s a carefully thought through process to maximize political power and personal return from public investments.

    Last week, we investigated the sophisticated scheme through which Siebel Newsom’s film and curricula “gender justice” nonprofit, The Representation Project, leverages taxpayer dollars to promote radical ideologies, personally profit, and push the political ambitions of her husband. She brags that 2.6 million students have seen the films nationwide.

    The Representation Project contracts with her for-profit film-production company, Girls Club Entertainment. Since 2012, Siebel Newsom received $1.5 million in salary from the nonprofit. Furthermore, since 2012, the Siebel’s nonprofit paid her for-profit Girls Club $1.6 million to produce films.

    Last month, our investigation broke the story that The Representation Project was not in compliance with the California Charitable Solicitation Act. The organization was not permitted to operate or solicit donations in California most of 2022 – yet spent all last year in operation and fundraising.

    Now, we dig deeper, investigating the $4.8 million “Office of the First Partner” Gavin Newsom established for his wife’s policy work, and how Jennifer Siebel Newsom used her position to impact social and political processes, cashing checks along the way.

    n 2019, Gov. Newsom created an office for his wife as a division within the governor’s executive team. According to a press release “the First Partner and her team will focus on lifting up women and their families, breaking down barriers for our youth, and furthering the cause of gender equity in California.”

    Since inception, Siebel Newsom’s office has received nearly $4.8 million in directed taxpayer funding. The Office of First Partner has grown from seven employees with a budget of $791,000, to nine employees with a budget of $1,166,000 proposed for 2023-2024.

    Snip.

    Parents have complained about the pornographic content in Newsom’s films shown to 11-year-olds (such as an animated, upside-down stripper with tape over breasts) and 15-year-olds (nearly naked women being slapped, handcuffed, and brutalized in images taken from porn sites) — to view images, viewer discretion is advised.

    Editorials have criticized the activities in Newsom’s film The Great American Lie as “emotionally abusive.” The activities ask students to publicly reveal personal information and force commentary on their relative “privilege” and “oppression.”

    So Jennifer Siebel Newsom is using California taxpayer money to propagandize children for radical social justice and transexism.

  • An Australian comedian, YouTuber and Journalist, made videos making fun of Australian politicians and covering their oppressive Flu Manchu lockdown policies. That’s when they started trying to use the state machinery to shut him up. Then they firebombed him.

    Jordan Shanks is an Australian comedian, also know as freindlyjordies, who fell in to doing YouTube videos about Australian politicians and powerful companies over the past few years. Along the way he became a journalist, the only journalist covering some of the things being done by the government and the corporations. Then in November of 2022 his house was firebombed. It was only by chance that he wasn’t in the house at the time.

    And hey, if that sounds too dry, well you kids like Knives Out or whatever. Stick around. It’s a pretty interesting whodunit.

    Most of the Australian press is even more in the bag for the powers-that-be than the US national media is for the Democrats. There were numerous stories, all but ignored by the mainstream. One example, the Premiere of New South Wales was under investigation. That was all but ignored by the press until she resigned. Then there were the antics of her Deputy Premiere, John Barilaro.

    That is the most entertaining — or damaging to powers that be — story friendlyjordies covered.

    As a result of that coverage, the Australian anti-terrorism machinery was directed at Shanks and his employees. Of course that turned out to be a group of Keystone cops, which got their own exposure on freindlyjordies. Along the way he exposed the abuse of the anti-terrorism squad, the relationship between some of the politicians and large corporations and perhaps organized crime. Then in November of the last year, after the lawsuits failed, the anti-terrorism actions failed, and the intimidation failed, someone moved to direct action, and tried to kill him.

  • You may remember my previous post on the army selecting the M5 Next Generation Squad Weapon. So how is that going? Evidently not well.

    On all key technical measures, the Next Generation Squad Weapons program is imploding before Army’s very eyes. The program is on mechanical life support, with its progenitors at the Joint Chiefs obstinately now ramming the program through despite spectacularly failing multiple civilian-sector peer reviews almost immediately upon commercial release.

    Indeed the rifle seems cursed from birth. Even the naming has failed. Army recently allowed a third-party company to scare it off the military designation M5. The re-naming will certainly also help scupper bad public relations growing around ‘XM-5′ search results.

    Civilian testing problems have, or should have, sunk the program already. The XM-5/7 as it turns out fails a single round into a mud test. Given the platform is a piston-driven rifle it now lacks gas, as the M-16 was originally designed, to blow away debris from the eject port. Possibly aiming to avoid long-term health and safety issues associated with rifle gas, Army has selected an operating system less hardy in battlefield environments. A choice understandable in certain respects, however, in the larger scheme the decision presents potentially war-losing cost/benefit analysis.

    Civilian testing, testing Army either never did or is hiding, also only recently demonstrated that the rifle seemingly fails, at point-blank ranges, to meet its base criteria of penetrating Level 4 body armor (unassisted). True, the Army never explicitly set this goal, but it has nonetheless insinuated at every level, from media to Congress, that the rifle will penetrate said armor unassisted. Indeed, that was the entire point of the program. Of course, the rounds can penetrate body armor with Armor Piercing rounds, but so can 7.62x51mm NATO, even 5.56x45mm NATO.

    The fundamental problem with the program is there remains not enough tungsten available from China, as Army knows, to make the goal of making every round armor piercing even remotely feasible. The plan also assumes that the world’s by far largest supplier will have zero problems selling tungsten to America only for it to be shot back at its troops during World War III. Even making steel core penetrators would be exceedingly difficult when the time came, adding layers of complexity and time to the most time-contingent of human endeavors. In any case, most large bullet manufacturers and even Army pre-program have moved to tungsten penetrators for a reason, despite the fact it increases the cost by an order of magnitude and supply seems troubled. Perhaps Army has a solution, perhaps.

    The slight increase in ballistic coefficiency between the 6.8x51mm and 7.62x51mm cartridges neither justified the money pumped into the program nor does the slight increase in kinetic energy dumped on target. Itself a simple function of case pressurization within the bastardized 7.62mm case. Thus the net mechanical results of the program design-wise is a rifle still chambered in a 7.62×51 mm NATO base case (as the M-14), enjoying now two ways to charge the weapon and a folding stock. This is the limit of the touted generational design ‘leap’ under the program. And while the increased case pressure technology is very welcome the problem is, in terms of ballistics, the round is in no way a leap ahead compared to existing off-the-shelf options as those Army nearly went with under the now disavowed Interim Combat Service Rifle program, or it in fact did purchase schizophrenically just before the NGSW program began with the HK M110A1.

    The Army is evidently still moving ahead with the program.

    I can’t tell you whether the criticisms are true or not unless Sig Saur sends me a example to shoot. While that would be cool, I suspect it’s pretty unlikely, and I fear many test ranges have picayune policies against using military grade automatic weapons…

  • How Georgetown Law cracked down on Flu manchu mandate heretics.

    For questioning Covid restrictions, Georgetown Law suspended me from campus, forced me to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, required me to waive my right to medical confidentiality, and threatened to report me to state bar associations.

    The Dean of Students claimed that I posed a “risk to the public health” of the University, but I quickly learned that my crime had been heretical, not medical.

    Just before I entered Georgetown Law in August 2019, I watched The Paper Chase, a 1973 film about a first-year Harvard Law student and his experiences with a demanding professor, Charles Kingsfield.

    The movie has the standard themes of law school: teaching students how to think, challenging the premises of an argument, differentiating fact patterns to support precedent. Kingsfield’s demands represent the difficulty of law school, and the most important skill is articulate, logic-based communication. “Nobody inhibits you from expressing yourself,” he scolds one student.

    “Nobody inhibits you from expressing yourself.”

    Two years later, I realized that Georgetown Law had inverted that script. The school fired a professor for commenting on differences in achievement between racial groups, slandered faculty members for deviating from university group-think, and threatened to destroy dissidents. Students banished cabinet officials from campus and demanded censorship of a tenured professor for her work defending women’s rights in Muslim-majority countries.

    Unaware of the paradigm shift, I thought it was proper to ask questions about Georgetown’s Covid policies.

    In August 2021, Georgetown Law returned to in-person learning after 17 months of virtual learning. The school announced a series of new policies for the school year: there was a vaccine requirement (later to be supplemented with booster mandates), students were required to wear masks on campus, and drinking water was banned in the classroom.

    Dean Bill Treanor announced a new anonymous hotline called “Law Compliance” for community members to report dissidents who dared to quench their thirst or free their vaccinated nostrils.

    Meanwhile, faculty members were exempt from the requirement, though the school never explained what factors caused their heightened powers of immunity.

    Shortly thereafter, I received a notification from “Law Compliance” that I had been “identified as non-compliant” for “letting the mask fall beneath [my] nose.” I had a meeting with Dean of Students Mitch Bailin to discuss my insubordination, and I tried to voice my concerns about the irrationality of the school’s policies.

    He had no answers to my simple questions but assured me that he “understood my frustration.” Then, he encouraged me to “get involved in the conversation,” telling me there was a Student Bar Association meeting set to take place the following Wednesday.

    I arrived at the meeting with curiosity. I had no interest in banging my fists and causing a commotion; I just wanted to know the reasoning – the “rational basis” that law schools so often discuss – behind our school’s policies. There were four simple questions:

  • What was the goal of the school’s Covid policy? (Zero Covid? Flatten the curve?)
  • What was the limiting principle to that goal? (What were the tradeoffs?)
  • What metrics would the community need to reach for the school to remove its mask mandate?
  • How can you explain the contradictions in your policies? For example, how could the virus be so dangerous that we could not take a sip of water but safe enough that we were required to be present? Why are faculty exempt from masking requirements?

    • I feared there were simple answers to my questions that I had overlooked: these administrators made hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, surely they must have had some reasoning behind their draconian measures. Right? The contradictions appeared obvious to me. The data seemed to be clear, but maybe there was an explanation.

    I delivered the brief speech without a mask, standing fifteen feet away from the nearest person. I awaited a response to my questions, but I realized this wasn’t about facts or data, premises or conclusions. This was about power and image.

    Arbitrary. Irrational. Capricious. Students learn in their first days of their legal education to invoke these words to challenge unfavored laws and policies. I figured that I was doing the same, and I thought the school would welcome a calm, albeit defiant, student asking the questions rather than loud and angry crowds.

    But this assumption turned out to be an incorrect premise. Nobody cared about my points regarding rationality – they cared that I had been reading from the wrong script. Even worse, not wearing a mask had been a more objectionable wardrobe malfunction than Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl performance.

    (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • Scrapped Railway Project Could Derail Putin’s Arctic Ambitions.

    Moscow’s ability to develop its own resource-based economy, expand the Northern Sea Route, cement ties with China and support Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to project power into the Arctic depends on the development of land-based infrastructure in the northern regions of the Russian Federation…

    Yet, that ability has now been called into question, as the Russian government has canceled, despite Putin’s repeated orders to the contrary, a program to complete the broad-gauge Northern Broad-Gauge Railway. The route was intended to link settlements that support the Northern Sea Route, military bases and the locations of key sources of raw materials across the Russian North with the rest of the country…

    Snip.

    What appears to be this project’s death knell, at least for the time being, is instructive in its own right. It occurred not with some dramatic single action by the Kremlin but in a rolling fashion as has often been the case with the backtracking of decisions under Putin. In April 2021, to much acclaim, the Russian president called for construction of the Northern Broad-Gauge Railway to begin, with the goal of completing the project in the next few years. Yet, despite Putin’s words, nothing happened, at least in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic, increased spending for his war against Ukraine and the impact of Western sanctions. Then, in 2022, Putin issued a new order for the project to go ahead. Again, nothing happened. Instead, less than a month later, Marat Khusnullin, a Russian deputy prime minister, quietly stopped all work on the project without giving anyone reason to think it would be resumed. Indeed, many Russian experts and commentators concerned with infrastructure issues believe that this railway plan has come to the end of its line, and one has even suggested that the cancellation of this project puts “a cross on the future of Russia.

    Russia was broke before it launched its illegal war of territorial aggression against the Ukraine. Now it’s even more broke.

    • Turns out I got through all but one…

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    Posted in Budget, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 9 Comments »

    A Perfect Storm Of Transportation Disaster?

    Thursday, October 20th, 2022

    Thanks to the SuperGenius policies of the Biden Administration (plus a touch of bad weather), all three of the primary methods by which goods are transported around the nation are under near-term threat:

  • Rail: Railroad ship a huge percentage of bulk commodities (wheat, coal, etc.), and provide the backbone of U.S. agricultural and industrial transport. But railroads are under threat of disruption due to union labor difficulties the Biden Administration has been unable to resolve.

    A union representing about 12,000 rail workers on Monday voted down a tentative contract that was brokered by the White House last month ahead of a possible rail strike.

    This vote will force the two sides back to the negotiating table and creates the possibility of a nationwide strike. The potential work stoppage could paralyze the nation’s supply chain and transportation rail service later this fall as the U.S. enters peak holiday season.

    Four unions have ratified contracts based on the agreement brokered by the White House, while seven have votes pending on the deal. The eleven unions represent about 115,000 rail workers.

    The two largest rail unions — the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Trainmen, or BLET, and the SMART Transportation Division, or SMART-TD, which make up roughly half of all rail workers — are set to finish voting in the middle of next month.

    The Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division of the Teamsters, or BMWED, rejected the tentative contract due to frustration with compensation and working conditions, particularly a lack of paid sick days, BMWED President Tony Cardell said in a statement on Monday.

    The Biden proposal and was widely viewed as a cynical way to delay any rail strike until after midterm elections. That means that most of the wheat harvest will be in, but most corn will still need to be transported. And corn is the largest agricultural commodity shipped by rail.

  • Long-Haul Trucking. Well, if you can’t ship via rail, at least you can ship in an 18-wheeler, right? The problem is that the overwhelming majority of 18-wheelers use diesel, and diesel is in short supply.

    The crisis gripping the US diesel market is getting out of hand, as demand is surging while supplies remain at the lowest seasonal level for this time of year ever, according to government data released Wednesday.

    According to the EIA, the US now has just 25 days of diesel supply, the lowest since 2008; and while inventories are record low, the four-week rolling average of distillates supplied – a proxy for demand – rose to its highest seasonal level since 2007.

    In short, record low supply (courtesy of stifling regulations that have led to a historic shortage of refining capacity) meet record high demand. What comes next is, well, ugly (while weekly demand dipped slightly in the latest week, it’s still at highest point in two years amid higher trucking, farming and heating use).

    The shortage of the fuel used for heating and trucking and – generally speaking – to keep commerce and freight running, has become a key worry for the Biden administration heading into winter, perhaps even bigger than the price of gas heading into the midterms (well, not really). As Bloomberg’s Javier Blas writes, “such low levels are alarming because diesel is the workhorse of the global economy. It powers trucks and vans, excavators, freight trains and ships. A shortage would mean higher costs for everything from trucking to farming to construction.”

    National Economic Council Director Brian Deese told Bloomberg TV Wednesday that that diesel inventories are “unacceptably low” and “all options are on the table” to build supplies and reduce retail prices.

    But while the White House claims to be so very concerned about the coming diesel crisis, it is doing absolutely nothing besides draining the SPR which has zero impact on diesel production.

    The historic diesel crunch comes just weeks ahead of the midterm elections and will almost certainly drive up prices for consumers who already view inflation and the economy as a top voting issue. Retail prices have been steadily climbing for more than two weeks. At $5.324 a gallon, they’re 50% higher than this time last year, according to AAA data.

    For those who might naively suggest “Well, oil refineries should just produce more diesel and less gasoline,” it doesn’t work that way. Though they sit side-by-side in gas pumps, the two fuels come from different points in the fractional distillation column, with Naphtha and Kerosene between them. You can’t just turn a knob to make more of one and less of the other.

    The diesel shortage is a direct result of of Democrats refusing to let new refineries be built.

  • Barge Transport. Well, if you can’t ship by rail or truck, at least you ship by barge? Not necessarily. The Mississippi River is hitting some of its lowest water levels in recorded history, resulting in parts of the river being closed to barge traffic.

    Drought closed a portion of the Mississippi River earlier this week, as the major waterway has been an absolute nightmare for tugboat captains to navigate.

    A stretch of the Mississippi River just northeast of Memphis, near Hickman, Kentucky, was closed on Monday because water levels reached record low levels. This caused a logjam of vessels and barges. And it’s the third time a portion of the river has been shuttered in weeks.

    We’ve reported dangerously low water levels have left farmers with a barge shortage as freight rates hyperinflate. Some farmers have piled up beans and other crops as logistical pipelines to transport farm goods from the Heartland by barge to export terminals in the US Gulf Coast are paralyzed due to extraordinary conditions on the Mississippi.

    Ag blog Delta Farm Press’ senior staff writer Ginger Rowsey spoke with barge captain Eric Badeaux who said it usually takes him 1-2 days to move barges from Morris, Illinois, down the Illinois River to the Mississippi River and on to New Orleans. He’s got over four decades of navigating cargo on the waterways and said because of drought and obstacles, it now takes 8-10 days for the same distance.

    “We had been on the boat two weeks and had not even made it to Memphis yet,” Badeaux said. At one point, Badeaux and his crew only traveled 60 miles in four days. They typically average 200 miles per day when heading south.

    “In one day, we burned 2,367 gallons of diesel fuel, just sitting here fighting the current,” Badeaux said. “That comes out to about $10,000 in fuel for one day, and we barely moved. Multiply the fuel costs for all of the boats just sitting here, plus all the other costs involved in boat maintenance and you can see why transportation costs are through the roof. It’s disastrous.”

    On a recent trip, Rowsey said that Badeaux pulled 20 barges of corn, soybeans, and coiled steel down the river, along with ten empty barges. He said the rapidly dropping water levels make the waterway risky to haul more barges. An average tow usually consists of 30-40 full barges.

    • There’s no guarantee that all three segments of transportation will hit crisis status at all, much less at the same time. A good bout of rain across the Midwest could ease Mississippi drought conditions. A last minute labor agreement could be reached, avoiding any strikes. And low diesel supplies don’t mean no diesel supplies.

    But if all three do hit crisis proportions in late November or early December, it’s quite likely that the holidays will be far from happy…

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    Posted in Democrats, Economics, Elections, Regulation, unions | 10 Comments »

    Ukraine Hits Train On Crimean Bridge

    Saturday, October 8th, 2022

    Ukraine manages to nail a Russian train laden with war materials as it was transiting the Kerch Strait Bridge.

    A massive fire is burning on the Kirch Strait Bridge that connects Russia to Crimea Saturday morning, with images showing multiple train cars fully engulfed and two spans of the road bridge in the water.

    Traffic on the bridge, a critical strategic artery for Russian forces in Crimea amid its war in Ukraine, has reportedly been halted as heavy flames and black smoke spew from a train carrying unknown cargo. Photos also show spans of both east and westbound lanes have collapsed into the water near the burning train.

    Yeah, it looks bad:

    Those collapsed spans are potentially a huge blow to Russia’s entire war effort, as they were already having difficulties keeping all of their field units adequately supplied. With the Kerch Strait Bridge out of commission, the job of resupplying the southern front goes from being difficult to being an absolute nightmare, and makes Melitopol even more vital to keeping troops on the southern flank supplied.

    The bridge cost billions to build after Russia seized Crimea in 2014 and has been one of Ukraine’s top targets, although it lacked traditional weaponry capable of striking it from far away. Even the Pentagon has openly stated that it sees the bridge as a viable target for Ukrainian forces. Russia has deployed air defenses and decoy barges in an attempt to protect it from some kind of attack in recent months.

    It’s hard for even a competent military to have effective air defense all along possible logistics routes, and Russia has been far from a competent military in this war.

    Suchomimus is on it:

    He maps it as too far for HIMARS, and thinks it was likely a drone attack.

    Russia has a 30,000 man strong rail organization. If it hasn’t suffered the same rot as the rest of the Russian armed forces (a big if), and if they can scrounge up the proper equipment (such as a crane barge; another big if), it could conceivably have the bridge repaired and usable again, possibly in as little as two to four weeks. It’s not easy, but it’s doable, and I imagine this is going to automatically jump to the top priority on the Russian logistics list. And, unlike the Antonovsky Bridge, it’s not currently in HIMARS range.

    But given the gross incompetence Russia’s military has shown in so many areas, it’s no sure bet that it can be repaired that quickly (or even at all) with assets in or near the theater.

    The clock is ticking…

    Update: Now reading that it was a truck bomb that took it out, timed to hit a passing fuel train, and that certainly seems plausible from fiercely the train was burning.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 14 Comments »

    China’s High Speed Rail Network Is A Trillion Dollar Debt Sinkhole

    Monday, June 13th, 2022

    Lefty sorts are always whining that other countries have high speed rail networks and we don’t. Many point to China’s extensive network of high speed rail as what we should be doing.

    Tiny problem: China’s high speed rail network is a giant, unprofitable sinkhole of $1.8 TRILLION worth of debt.

    Some take-aways:

  • The average operating loss for the system is $24 million per day.
  • The official amount for China National Railway debt for high speed rail is $900 billion, but since roughly half of the debt comes from local governments, the total is probably closer to $1.8 trillion.
  • For comparison sake, $1.8 trillion is about South Korea’s entire yearly GDP.
  • “Shanghai, the richest city in China, has a total GDP of $600 billion in 2020, which means that even the whole year of Shanghai’s GDP won’t be able to cover the debt of China National Railway.”
  • It’s extensive: 37,900km, nearly double the length from 2015.
  • Return on high speed rail investment is only about 2%, and the bulk of bond payments for loans are coming due over the next few years. “Cash flow from railway transportation revenue isn’t enough to cover the operating costs, let alone the ability to pay the debt and interest.”
  • Local government debt levels are around 100%.
  • “More than 85% of the funds raised through urban investment bonds are earmarked for repaying old debts with new ones.”
  • Even the most profitable high speed rail stretch, Beijing to Shanghai, only earns a return on investment of 5%.
  • Japan’s successful high speed rail network serves three metropolitan areas (Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka) that have 55% of that nation’s population.
  • “A professor at the School of Economics and Management of Beijing Jiaotong University concluded that the operating costs are only just covered when the transport density of a high-speed rail line reaches 36 million passenger kilometers per kilometer. In China the average transport density is only about 17 million passenger kilometers per kilometer.”
  • High speed rail can’t transport heavy freight.
  • “The Lanzhou Uramuchi HSR in western China can run more than 160 trains per day. In reality, this route only runs four trains per day.”
  • High speed rail occupancy rate is only 30%, and is still too expensive for most Chinese to use.
  • High speed rail construction has squeezed out much-needed construction of regular rail. “China’s rail freight capacity can’t meet market demand. China’s market share of road freight turnover has risen rapidly to 49% market share in 2016.” China rail has jacked up freight costs to make up for losses on high speed rail.
  • China’s freight trucks get overloaded all the time.
  • China’s containerized shipping accounts for 40% of global trade, but “the proportion of China’s sea rail intermodal transport volume in 2017 was only about 2.5 percent.” 84% of port containers go out by road.
  • So why all the money poured into high speed rail? Opportunities for corruption.

    Officials see the high-speed rail project in which China is involved as a lucrative opportunity. China’s former minister of railways, known as the father of high-speed rail, was sentenced to death for corruption. Emerging industries such as high-speed rail, which offer both substantial commercial value and political achievements for local officials, have enormous room for corruption. In a systemically corrupt environment white elephant projects, that is a large project that falls significantly short of its goals, and the costs of upkeep outweigh its usefulness, are favored by many officials and businessmen looking to make a fortune. The vast majority of high-speed railways around the world can’t make ends meet on passenger revenues alone to cover their construction and operating costs. Most operate at a loss.

    In light of all that, why do American leftists keep complaining about America’s lack of high speed rail? Simple: It’s the corruption, stupid. High speed rail construction offers boundless opportunities for graft and corruption, and refusing to build any keeps them from getting their snouts into another giant trough of taxpayer money…

    (I didn’t expect this past week to become a string of “China’s economy is smoke and mirrors all the way down” posts, but I keep running into more examples.)

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    Posted in Communism, Economics, Foreign Policy, video, Waste and Fraud | 17 Comments »

    The Failed Logistics Of The Russian Invasion

    Sunday, March 6th, 2022

    I’ve touched on some of the logistical difficulties Russia has experienced in its Ukrainian invasion. But this video goes into more detail about how Russia built up logistical support for the invasion, the importance of its rail systems, and how it hasn’t been able to keep up post-invasion.

    Some takeaways:

  • Ukrainian forces destroyed all rail links between the two countries.
  • Russian forces are relying on analog, unsecured radio communications rather than scrambled digital channels, and Ukrainian forces are listening in and jamming.
  • Poor logistics also helped Soviet forces lose in Afghanistan.
  • Russia has 30,000 strong military rail organization.
  • “Russia doesn’t have enough trucks.” They can’t operate effectively more than 90 miles from supply dumps.
  • A large percentage of truck transport was dedicated to rocket resupply, not fuel and food.
  • Russia only had 3-5 days of supplies when they invaded. When those ran out, they were screwed.
  • Russia’s military works on a “push” logistic system rather than a “pull” system used by the U.S. military, meaning it’s not very flexible.
  • Russia has the capability to set up the infrastructure for a longer war, but it’s going to take time.
  • Russia’s failure to quickly achieve it’s objectives has seen it resort to more desperate and indiscriminate tactics.

    • And here’s a related Twitter thread that touches on rail network logistic issues.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 12 Comments »